by Sam Smith
Our first task though, he said, was to build a shelter around the shuttle, screen its light from the night's curious eyes.
"Then we've got to clean it out and learn to live, at least part of the time, like civilised beings again."
For the rest of that day the three of us wallowed in that primeval pool, reverting not for the last time to trying to imagine how that spaceman had come to be on Balant; and wondering if the settlement on the other side of the mountain posed a threat to us.
So began, what I now look back upon as, the happiest period of my stay on Balant. Rescue, or escape, despite my many doubts and reservations, seemed sooner or later to be assured. In the meantime we had much to do, a definite goal to aim for. We were — the very best of all things — busy.
From the lower slopes of the mountains we cut down some long slender trees, dragged and carried them down to the desert. Then, learning as we built, we erected a three sided housing with a part roof around the shuttle — leaving enough of the solar trap exposed to top up its energy needs. The walls we made by weaving Dag’s all-purpose flat leaves through the timber framework. That way the shuttle's light could not be seen at night, and the wing roof remained hidden from the mountain during the day.
Using the minder’s vice, I bent the valet’s casing into two serviceable pots. The cooking we did in the cave. Dag was in charge of that; Malamud and I daily going in search or ever more food to fill Dag's capacious pots, and ever more wood to fuel his fire.
The food that he had boiled to a mulch Dag then tied in a soft cloth bag and pressed between two flat stones with a lever. One cave he made his store, rigged up a timber scaffolding and there hung the bags to dry. While Malamud and I went ever further and further afield in search of more berries, more cakefruit, more nuts. The nuts Dag did not use for cooking, for we had found that, if left in their hard shells, the nuts would keep indefinitely. So we built up a separate supply of those.
Out all day, lugging the laden stretcher homeward in the evenings, sleeping in the cave or in the shuttle, whichever happened to be closer when night fell, even though I was on a planet, even though I was daily scratched by thorns and bitten by an innumerable variety of insects, never before or since have I felt so healthy, so invigorated. At last I came to terms with Balant and gave up my tattered space tunic in favour of one of Dag's leaf tunics.
I actually began to enjoy Balant's abundance of noise; and often I slept in the cave out of preference: to sleep close to the fire, breathe the strangely comforting smell of woodsmoke. Indeed if one of us, while we were out foraging far food, said that he was going home, we knew that he meant to the cave. The shuttle was the shuttle. The cave we had made our own.
Yet I knew, for all the care with which we had furnished that cave, when the time came I would leave it, as I have left many a cherished home since, with scarcely a backward glance.
On those days when Dag had more than enough fuel and food to be going on with, Malamud and I would lay snoozing the daylong in our bath. One day we floated there on our backs while it rained, gazed mutely up together at the majesty of a stormfilled sky, clouds like rocks cracking together above our heads. Another day I lay on my belly beside Malamud, both of us engrossed in some insects building themselves a papery house of many corridors. And occasionally, in the evenings, I programmed a new game for Malamud, listened in to the radio wavelengths. The only message on the Mayday frequencies was our own. A reminder of our plight, a moment of sadness, soon dispelled by the sleep of the exhausted.
Chapter Twelve
We watch. Or are we being watched? The re-invention of alcohol, beset by earth tremors, references to luck again, decision is made to do or die, followed by the improbable claims of philosophy.
I had invented a new game for Malamud, was showing him the rules when Dag knocked flat-handed on the screen. We had expected him to stay the night in the cave with his cooking. Wondering what could have brought him down to the shuttle, I opened the door. Dag thrust a flagon into my chest and, stepping past me, gave another to Malamud.
“Gentlemen," he said. "This evening marks the end of our sixth month on Balant. With this,” he held aloft his own flagon, "I propose that we celebrate our survival.”
While Dag bad been speaking Malamud had taken a sip from his flagon. He smacked his lips.
"It’s booze.” He tasted some more, "Definitely booze.”
I took a swig from my flagon. The liquid within had a pungent fruity flavour.
“How?” I asked Dag.
"One of the byways of scientific endeavour," he sat down. “I saved some of the juice from our pressings, kept it in some cake shells in the rear of the cave. Thirsty work cooking. Forgot about it until I smelt it. And lo and behold.”
So began a very jolly evening. These busy days we were rarely all three of us together at the same time, consequently we had much to talk about that evening. Of immediate interest was the man Malamud and I had seen a few days previously.
In our ever widening search for food we had taken some of the bags that Dag had made and we had gone in the direction of the spaceman's cave. On the second afternoon of our foraging we had espied a man standing on a mountain ledge above us. Malamud and I had hidden and had watched him.
From the distance we had been able to discern but very little. His clothing had appeared to have been made of animal skins; and he had leant on a long stick, which Malamud had guessed to be a weapon. Whether firearm or spear neither of us had been able to decide; and so still had he been, gazing out over the desert to the sea, that Malamud and I had begun to doubt our eyes. Then the man had taken a step and had disappeared.
We wondered what the man’s presence might signify. Were the people from the settlement about to come to our side of the mountains? Had the man been a scout? Or had he been but one lone hunter? We could only translate our fears and hopes into imaginative supposition; and so we drifted onto other old topics. How had the spaceman come to Balant? If his ship had crashed, why hadn’t he and the two robots perished with it? And if his ship was intact, but hidden, why hadn’t he remained in it?
The more the drink stole into our systems the more fantastic did our speculations become.
"Now this is truly civilised," Malamud held aloft his flagon. "Show me a civilised man and I'll show you a drunkard." Which remark led Dag and I to consider drink’s ever-recurring popularity. That people had once indulged in other narcotics seemed comically absurd; yet civilisation, apart from a few dour cranks, had accepted alcohol without question. Puritans, of course, throughout every age have abhorred it, have tried to have it abolished; and technicians have tried to make it into a pill. But still it persists in its liquid form. Whence its persistence? Its sociability?
I did take issue with Malamud's remark about drunkards. True I had seen incapable drunkards at the supply station, but most civilised people, like me, were properly content with a light wine with their meals.
"It's a balm," Dag said. I noticed that he was slurring. "Soothes the frayed ends. Legend has it that the first place to have gravity on the first space stations was always the bar."
"Be too confusing being legless and weightless," Malamud said. His speech too was indistinct.
"Tell me,” Dag said, “Tell me anything else that has lasted this long."
“Books," I said. "Paper books." I too was having difficulty separating words one from another. "They have lasted this long."
"True," Dag said. "Wonder why."
“Especially as," Malamud said, “you can't get drunk and read at the same time." Dag and Malamud both thought that funny and fell off their seats laughing. I waited until they had stopped and had climbed back onto their seats, then I said,
"It's because you can carry a book with you. You don't need a machine. You don’t need light to recharge it. Only to read it. It's there for you whenever you want to pick it up."
"True Pi," Dag said.
"All we need now is some girls," Malamud rubbed his hands together, "an
d we could have a really lively evening."
Dag and I smiled at one another; but, drunk as we were, we none of us pursued the topic: it smacked too much of home, and we had tacitly reached an agreement that home was not to be mentioned. Possibly because we did not want to be reminded of our loved ones so far away, to be made homesick by another's reminiscing — remembrances certain to be exaggerated by longing.
I tried to remember when I had first realised that we avoided the topic, fell to wondering about Malamud and his girls. True he had flirted with many young girls on the supply stations; but no serious attachments, so far as I was aware, had come of those flirtations. Although he had asked me once to help compose a letter to one girl.
While Dag, I knew, had been looking forward to being reunited with his girlfriend at university. She had been in the same year as him.
I had no girlfriends. That is not to say that I hadn't been attracted to many of the girls at the supply station; but I had found that, as soon as I had talked to them, their beauty had vanished. For their words had not matched the intelligence I had assumed to be at one with their physical beauty. So I had decided to wait until I reached university and the girls were of proven intelligence. Wondering if I would ever reach university, I fell asleep.
I slept through the morning cacophony, awoke to the full glare of day. Dag and Malamud were sleeping still. Malamud had fallen asleep sitting beside Dag’s seat. Dag's hand lay loosely on Malamud's breast. It made a pretty picture. I smiled to see it.
Attracted by a movement, I looked out through the screen.
At first I thought that I must still be dreaming. The shuttle was rocking. Then I noticed that the shelter was swaying to and fro as well. Some branches from the shelter fill with a clatter onto the shuttle roof.
“It's an earthquake,” I said to myself.
The rocking seemed to increase in response to my words. Dag was slipping off his seat, confusedly coming awake.
"The warm stream," I told myself. Balant was still a young planet, its crust subject to violent volcanic movement.
"What?" Dag said.
With a bang which woke Malamud, one of the shelter roles landed athwart the shuttle.
"It's an earthquake!" I shouted. "Hold onto something!”
The vibrations increased, reached such a pitch that the minder came rolling out of its corner and bounced up and down on the floor. We all three clung onto our seats and stared at the bouncing minder.
Then it stopped.
In the awful silence that followed the three or us looked wide-eyed at one another, then around the inside of the shuttle, and then back to one another again. Another pole fell onto the shuttle roof. The minder rolled back to its corner.
"Just what," Malamud stood rubbing his head, "was in that drink last night?” Dag ignored him.
"We've overstayed our welcome," he declared. "Things are closing in on us. First the man. Now this. Our luck has started to run out. Let's take the warnings to heart and leave.” He opened the shuttle door. I asked him where he was going.
"To the cave. Check that the food's alright. While I'm gone you two repair the shelter. When I come back we’ll figure out a way of taking off.”
"But...” I began.
"We will do it!" he snapped at me, and was gone.
Malamud and I spent that day shinning up vertical poles, handing one another up the cross-poles and slotting them back into place. We then rethreaded the leaves through the slats.
While we worked Malamud made many a caustic comment, with reference to Dag’s brusque manner that morning, about people who inflicted their hangovers on everyone else. In between his chatter I tried to think of how we could leave Balant. I still hadn't thought of anything when Dag returned.
"You finish that Malamud. Pi, you come with me.”
Leaving Malamud muttering at his repairs, I followed Dag — not a little uneasy about this abrupt change in his personality — into the shuttle. This was not the affable peace-making companion I had known during our many travails thus far.
Dag sat himself businesslike before the console.
“How are we going to take off?" he said as I sat beside him.
"I don't see how we can," I replied.
“Why not?"
I patiently explained to him that the shuttle was not aerodynamically designed. The shuttle had been built to operate in space only, not within a planet's atmosphere. I reminded him of the sleek shapes of the police ships and of the ore carriers which were designed to land on planets.
"All that kept us aloft when we came in," I said, “was propulsion. And that is all that we steer by. To take off we’d have to build up speed along the ground. We'd crash within a few meters."
"Why can't we go straight up?"
"Because our main engines are in the rear. The wing engines are for steering and braking only."
“We’ve got wings therefore we can fly,” Dag stated his simplistic belief.
"No. We've got wings only as a housing for the steering and the braking engines. And for the solar traps. Go outside and throw a stone," I told him, "It will stay in the air only so long as its speed is greater than the gravity of this planet. As soon as it loses speed it will fall to the ground. So too this shuttle. Except that we will never acquire the speed to leave the ground."
I reminded him again of the police ships and ore carriers, how elegant they appeared compared to our stubby shuttle, told him how their very shape helped to keep them aloft.
"We are going to fly Pi." Dag gripped my shoulder, stared hard at me, "If I have to throw us in the air, we are going to fly."
I suspected that the stresses of the last few months had wreaked their toll on him.
"Have we enough food?" I asked him, to give him something specific to consider.
"No matter how much we’ve got, it's of no use if we can’t leave this planet. First we have to fly.”
“A test flight?” I said, “Then we will have to land again. If you recall our first landing, how do you propose that we land without crashing?"
Malamud had come in. Dag looked from one to the other of us.
“Philosophy," he announced with what I can only describe as a manic elevation of his beard. “We will fly and we will land by virtue of philosophy.”
Chapter Thirteen
An increasing sense of urgency towards take-off
More to humour Dag than in earnest, I prepared the shuttle for flight. Although, of course, once I had started the work I became engrossed in it, executed it to the best of my ability.
With Malamud's help, by knotting and plaiting slender vines, I made a number of lengths of thin rope. This rope we then tied around each block inside the console.
While Malamud and I were thus occupied, Dag squatted outside in the shade of the shelter. For three days, a bunch of leaves in his hand, with which to flick away insects, he squatted by the corner post and gazed squint-eyed out to the desert. Such incommunicative inactivity infuriated Malamud.
"Look at him sitting there on his haunches,” he said. “Worse than you on your leg Pi. Thinking. While all we get is sore fingers." The vines had a rough exterior.
We were making a long rope with which to secure the minder when Dag came into the shuttle. Malamud and I assumed that he had come in for a drink of water. When we didn't hear the glug of the flagon we looked up from our labours. Dag was smiling.
"Philosophy Pi," he said, “does not admit to any problem being insoluble. Philosophy, moreover, is how we approach problems. Step by step. All of it an attitude of mind. The fourth dimension time, the fifth imagination. Allaying the incongruous to the sublime. I saw this film once — about some people sliding over snow in a sled. We, gentlemen, are going to build a sled."
"Oh wonderful," Malamud said, "We're going to build a sled. Then wait until it snows. In a desert."
I, however, was not so readily dismissive, for I could see its potential.
"How are we going to fix the shuttle to it?" I asked Dag.
"More rope," Malamud said.
“It's not going to be fixed," Dag said. “The sled will be built at an angle. The nose pointing up. I've made a model."
He had tied some thin sticks together with dry grass stems. The sticks formed two right angled triangles, which were joined together — along the hypotenuse and the uprights — by shorter sticks.
"It'll tip over," I said. "We'll land on our nose, end up on our back."
"You've misunderstood the scale. It will be twice the length of the shuttle. The shuttle will sit back here so that its weight will lift the front end of the sled. Soon as we've picked up enough speed, we’ll take off, leave it behind."
Equal and opposite reactions: trying to imagine the effect the shuttle's engines would have, I pushed the model along with my finger.
“It might work," I said.
“It will work," Dag assured me.
"Supposing it does, have you worked out how we'll land?'
"Easy. Remember what stopped us coming in? All those small bushes and vines? We'll tie ropes across our landing place, fly into them."
"That'll turn us over," I said. "Unless we are going very slowly.”
"Have you any better ideas?" Dag impatiently asked me.
“Yes,” I smiled to placate him. “But I hadn’t known how to do it until you mentioned the ropes. The old planet ships used parachutes to brake themselves on landing. We don't have any cloth strong enough for parachutes; but I can make an anchor out of the stretcher, fix it to the shuttle’s tow line. If we release it just before we land, it'll catch in the ropes, and we will be braked from behind."
"I knew it," Malamud said, looking at his sore fingertips, “more rope."
“This time," Dag tapped him affectionately on the nose, "I'll help.”
Although I still had doubts about the efficacy of the sled; and, though Malamud continued to grumble, we pressed on with our work.
Using levers we raised the shuttle up so that I could measure the capacity of the tow line locker underneath it. The minder and I then cut up the stretcher, converted it into a three dimensional cross, tied it to the tow line and stowed it in the locker. I then went to help Dag and Malamud with the construction of the sled.